Year Zero (2000), page 19
43
Beyond the first set of observation portals Molly saw:
gargantuan mice with giant human ears grafted on to their backs;
pigs with the wings of bats, birds and angels;
the heads and spinal cords of gorillas and cattle mounted on hectic assemblies of glass and rubber tubing, through which red and blue fluids circulated endlessly;
sheep whose thick fleeces were brightly patterned in pink and blue;
thick-boled conifers whose boles were covered with leopard-skin and mink-fur instead of bark;
cacti whose many-spiked bodies were sculpted into humanoid form, like legions of Saint Sebastians;
and bushes whose vibrating flower-heads emitted musical notes of amazing purity and timbre.
Behind the second set of ultra-thick doors Molly saw: a series of huge bicep-like muscles six or eight feet long, flexing continuously to pull two huge metal bars together and drive them apart again;
an array of hearts the size of basketballs pumping luminous fluids through three-dimensional mazes of transparent tubing;
a row of transparent artificial wombs within which dozens of unrecognisable embryos slept;
a million staring eyes, some cyclopean, others grouped in pairs and others gathered into compound masses;
a flock of peacocks whose multicoloured tails swirled with bronze and silver, gold and imperial purple;
a battery of headless, featherless and footless chickens with plastic tubes carrying nutrients disappearing into their necks and others carrying waste products away at the rear, and a multi-layered pyramidal assembly of brains in belljars, of many different sizes.
Through the third set of observation windows Molly saw: classrooms in which cheetahs, mandrills, warthogs, tapirs, spider-monkeys, capybaras and hyenas whose bodies had been surgically modified into humanoid form were sitting before computerized blackboards learning the eight times table;
nurseries full of baby chimeras, some with the bodies of cats, the wings of parrots and the heads of snakes, others with the bodies of iguanas, the wings of dragonflies and the heads of bushbabies, and others with the bodies of natterjack toads,
the wings of ostriches and the heads of wasps; gardens in which thorny bushes grew within the flesh of human beings planted waist-deep;
sweatshops in which children with plastic-covered wires sprouting from their shaven skulls were working sewing machines at a furious rate, their tiny hands flying hither and yon as they processed bolts of gossamer cloth into garments;
hospital wards in which the flesh of every patient was rippled and undulated by the squirming of larvae beneath the skin;
studios in which half-humans from which everything beneath the navel had been removed and substituted with the nether parts of goats, horses and wildebeests were painting in oils, producing masterpieces of which Hieronymus Bosch would not have been ashamed, had he only had the opportunity to paint from life;
and workshops in which the cadavers of non-functional cyborgs were laid out on tables like mortuary slabs while multitudinous robot ants and plastic centipedes carried spare parts of metal or flesh, where steel fireflies flared and fumed as they settled to make spot-welds.
In the fourth set of isolation-chambers Molly saw:
marine aquaria in which teams of busy cuttlefish were patiently erecting submarine apartment-blocks, communicating between themselves by changing colour, while gigantic sea anemones trawled the water for edible debris;
festoons of spiderwebs through which hairy black arachnids moved with sinister grace, clotted here and there with ragged clusters of yellow eggs;
patchworks of four-foot-long cocoons from some few of which moth-winged humanoids were struggling to escape; trees whose globoid fruits were bowls full of turgid liquid
in which long frilly worms twisted themselves into improbable knots;
vivaria in which the two heads of brightly coloured bifurcate snakes competed for the privilege of swallowing their own tails;
shallow pools where somnolent turtles with jewelled shells lay, staring back at her with heavy-lidded but preternaturally intelligent eyes;
and grottoes whose walls were lavishly decorated with redistributed human flesh, sprouting arms, legs and genitalia more-or-less at random but manifesting far more faces than the limbs and other accoutrements could ever have been coupled with under normal circumstances.
Within the fifth set of vaults Molly saw:
Elvis, looking exactly as he had at the very end of his life, bloated and dazed and but deeply troubled, as if mourning some lost love;
Robert Maxwell, looking like a corpse which had been immersed in the sea for a very long time, attended all the while by shoals of greedy fish, but still striding back and forth like a man with a mission;
Gilles de Rais and Erszabet Bathory, looking hideously raddled and half-melted, commiserating with one another on the monstrous injustice of having been framed by such immoderate enemies;
Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein, sharing a meal; Marilyn Monroe and Patsy Cline, dancing on puppet-strings controlled by a huge computer and weeping constantly for a series of long-lost loves;
Boris Karloff made up as Frankenstein's monster, hunting for a bolt that had come adrift from his neck;
and a gymnasium in which thirty-three clones of Adolf Hitler, steroidally overloaded in spite of having only one ball apiece, were working out furiously, zealously cultivating muscles fit for finalists in the Mr. Universe contest.
The sixth circular array of rooms contained laboratories in which:
the skeletons of half a dozen angels of various sizes were strung together with steel wire;
six-foot-high glass tubes full of formaldehyde were crowded, within which floated the preserved corpses of greys and at least a hundred other alien species, only a few of which Molly had glimpsed during her selective tour of the inhabited worlds of the Orion Arm;
doleful demons were confined in narrow cages, their wings covered in purulating sores and their horns broken by the convulsive battering of their heads against the bars;
octopuses of a very ordinary size were busy inscribing circles, ellipses and amoeboid symbols on tablets of stone, using acetylene torches clasped in their many tentacles;
Honeysuckle and Peaseblossom were laid out with arms and legs at full stretch, with giant bradawls through their wrists and ankles, and their torsos carefully cut away to reveal the neatly rearranged delicately pink organs within;
an Abyssinian cat was practising the delicate art of walking in high-heeled black PVC boots;
and multiple clones of Edward Hyde and Marjorie De'Ath involved themselves shamelessly in all the multitudinous forms of sexual intercourse that Molly had been privileged to witness in the course of her chequered career.
Through the last set of portholes Molly saw:
a drill-square on which a legion of zombie soldiers were being put through their paces by a howling sergeant who bore more than a passing resemblance to a younger and fitter Beelzebub;
a swimming-pool full of boiling blood in which dozens of men and women were immersed as far as the neck;
a maternity-unit in which dozens of headless, armless and legless female torsos were straining to give simultaneous birth to deformed infants;
a mortuary block from which the badly-burned body of a young black boy was struggling to rise, although the tortured expression in his eyes testified that he would far rather rest in peace;
a vast block of ice enclosing an entity which might have been Beelzebub's fatter and unhealthier brother;
a wind-tunnel in which tiny naked humans with Molly's own face and the wings of hummingbirds were secured by
massive blobs of glue to rigid vertical wires while the artificial tempest forced them to fly faster and faster without ever making progress;
and a dissecting-room whose slab was quite bare, although a tray containing a host of gleaming stainless steel instruments was ready beside it.
44
Molly clicked her camera at every appalling sight, hoping that whatever digital cameras had instead of rolls of film wasn't as readily exhaustible. Drs. Hyde and De'Ath didn't appear to notice the camera in her hand as she lifted it again and again. They seemed far more concerned with noting her facial reactions. She tried not to give them the satisfaction of seeing how distressed she really was, but she knew that the dereliction of her soul and desolation of her spirit must be showing.
She wasn't entirely surprised when Dr. Hyde unlocked the last vault-door of all and swung it open. She turned to run, but Mr. Wilson had caught up with them by now, and he was only too eager to grab her.
Beam me up! she cried, silently—but she knew now that the flying saucers would never be able to reach her down here. Wilson carried her to the dissecting table and laid her out. He lifted a device like a gargantuan staple-gun from the tray and shot four huge pins into her hands and heels. Only then did Dr. De'Ath pick up an obscenely large hypodermic syringe and ram its point into her windpipe. Molly choked on the liquid which flowed into her throat but it didn't knock her out and it didn't numb the pain.
It was Dr. Hyde who cut her clothes off, piece by piece. He threw the scraps into the corner of the room. The mobile phone and the camera—which she had hidden once again within her pocket—went with them. It occurred to Molly, rather belatedly, that they probably hadn't stopped her taking the pictures because they knew she wasn't going to get out of the building and hadn't given a damn what she did. They didn't know abut Wingate's extra insurance policy, but whatever good that might do him, it seemed that it wasn't going to be any help to her.
When she was completely naked, Wilson pointed out the part of her breast from which he'd taken the greys' biochip, and then he tapped her sternum ominously. Hyde nodded, and took up a circular saw. When he switched it on it hummed like a hive-full of angry bees. De'Ath and Wilson stepped clear to allow him room to operate. He started at the neck and cut along the entire length of the sternum, then continued sawing through the softer tissues of her abdomen until he reached her clitoris. Then he took the loose flaps of skin in his hands and wrenched them apart, splitting her as Honeysuckle and Peaseblossom had been split.
Hyde turned to De'Ath and pointed at something in Molly's belly, in the vicinity of her womb. "That's what we need," he said, in a tone that mingled modest relief with smug self-satisfaction. "Better make sure that she doesn't see this."
Wilson took up two mounted needles, and plunged them into Molly's eyes. She presumed that the points must have gone all the way through to her brain, because that was the moment at which she finally, and mercifully, blacked out.
45
When Molly woke up to find her unclothed body sandwiched between a medium-hard mattress and a floral-patterned duvet the first thing she did was check her hands and the space between her breasts.
There were no wounds, nor even any tangible scars. Her immediate assumption was that she must be on the alien mothership and that the greys had fixed her up again, just like last time, but somehow it just didn't seem plausible. The walls were papered and there were framed pictures hanging on them. Molly recognised a photograph of Albert Einstein and a portrait of Charles Darwin, but the others were unfamiliar. The bedside table was unvarnished pine, the chair beside the bed was grey plastic with an aluminium frame and the wardrobe had been fitted together from an MFI flat-pack.
The greys had had far better taste than that.
The implausibility of Molly's situation increased by a further order of magnitude when Marjorie De'Ath walked into the room, smiling. The smile seemed strangely warm and welcoming.
The grey-haired woman was carrying a tray which she set down on the bedside table. It contained a mug of white coffee and a plate of Jaffa cakes.
"Hello Molly," said Dr. De'Ath, sitting down beside the bed and handing Molly the coffee-mug. "How do you feel?"
"What day is it?" Molly asked, suspiciously.
"Friday. I'm sorry that we had to keep you out so long, but we had to make sure that every last trace of the trigger-drug was flushed out of your system. You wouldn't believe the trouble we had scouring your flat. We didn't bother with 1303 Arcadia House, on the grounds that the new tenant almost certainly isn't carrying any rogue viruses."
"You cleaned my flat?" Molly said, warily, as she sipped the coffee. If her taste-buds could be trusted, it wasn't instant. Molly was still a little confused, but she knew that cleaning flats wasn't the kind of thing the Devil's minions were supposed to do.
"Yes. It should be safe now. Wilson's men are watching it round the clock. I'm sorry that we had to lure you away from London like that, and that we had to take you so close to the edge, but we were pretty certain that you'd pull through. How do you feel—I really would like to know."
"Not bad," Molly confessed.
"I'll send for your clothes in a little while. First, you're entitled to an explanation."
"Am I?" Molly parried, jesuitically.
"The file that Wingate showed you wasn't complete. Apart from the reference to Christine, however, it was accurate. Minutely accurate." She paused, as if waiting to be contradicted. Molly knew that the older woman must be referring to the transcripts of her interviews with the men in black —the ones that had shown them in such a flattering light. Molly wasn't tempted to observe that pigs might fly.
"May I tell you what else we know about you?" Dr. De'Ath asked, politely.
"Feel free."
"On December thirteenth, 1999," the old woman recited, somewhat after the fashion of a policeman giving evidence in a particularly boring court case, "you asked your social worker, Elizabeth Peach, whether your two daughters could spend New Year's Eve with you and then go with you to Trafalgar Square to see in the year 2000. Their foster-parents, Mr. and Mrs. Jarvis, objected on the grounds that Angie was too young to be out so late and that Trafalgar Square was likely to be a dangerous environment on that particular night. After some negotiation, the compromise decision was that Angie would remain in Tooting with Mrs. Jarvis while you and Christine spent the evening together at your then residence, a Bed and Breakfast hotel in Brixton—but that Mr. Jarvis would collect Christine from the B&B at one a.m. precisely.
"Because almost all the other residents of the hotel wanted to go to Trafalgar Square, you volunteered to listen for any signs of distress from the young children they left behind. Two others remained behind, but Anne Hawksley was not generally considered fit to baby-sit and Francine Docherty was busy entertaining her boyfriend, known to her and to you as Adam. However, all of these others gathered in the ground floor room where the television was kept in order to take part in what two of them considered to be the countdown to a new millennium. When the chimes of Big Ben had sounded, Anne Hawksley returned to bed and Francine Docherty fell into a drunken stupor, while you and the man calling himself Adam engaged in a mildly self-congratulatory discussion occasioned by the fact that both of you held fast to the pedantic opinion that the new Millennium would not actually begin until January the first, 2001. Christine listened, until Mr. Jarvis picked her up in his car, as arranged.
"Francine's boyfriend then favoured you with a long speech regarding the measures employed to combat the so-called Y2K problem, arguing that the inaptly programmed machines were actually right, and that the new year would be far better thought of as year zero than year 2000. He argued, too flamboyantly to be taken entirely seriously, that a glorious opportunity had been missed—that the world could have and should have shaken off the burden of the past and set itself to start from scratch, to make a new beginning. He suggested that it had been ridiculous to persuade the machines to continue dragging the burden of 1999 years of historical folly and error, and that the wise thing to do would have been to let civilization grind to a halt, pause for reflection, and then begin anew without all the social and psychological luggage that would be better discarded. Is that a fair summary, do you think?"
"You had a lousy B&B that was doubling as a home for fallen women bugged?" Molly said, incredulously. "Why?"
"There were no hidden microphones in the B&B, at that stage," Marjorie De'Ath told her. "Mr. Wilson was, however, stationed in a car across the street, with a directional mike trained on the front room window, picking up every little vibration. He had been following the pseudonymous Adam for some weeks."
"Why?" Molly said, uncomfortably aware that she was becoming repetitive.
"Because Mr. Wilson suspected that the man in question was about to launch an illicit field trial of what we assumed at the time to be a new psychotropic drug—although it now seems that this was an underestimation of the complexity of his scheme. We do know, however, that he exposed all four of the people who were with him as midnight approached to a biohazardous compound. Two of its victims were dead within a matter of weeks, having failed to negotiate stage two of the programme, but the other two survived. You, Molly, have been living the consequences of the illicit experiment for more than eight months. We believe that Christine has been following in your footsteps, and may have been deemed the more interesting of the two remaining subjects. We assume, of course, that she is currently with the experimenters. We don't know where, but we intend to do everything possible to find out."
Molly thought hard about all this while she worked her way through one Jaffa cake after another, as grateful for the glucose shot as she was for the taste of oranges. "You're saying that I've been drugged for the last eight months?" she said, finally.
"On and off," said Dr. De'Ath. "They didn't give you the second part of the cocktail until March, of course—when you were persuaded to believe that you'd been abducted by aliens."
"Persuaded to believe?"
"You've been in a more-or-less constant state of induced paranoia," Dr. De'Ath amplified, less helpfully than she seemed to think. "That has affected your perception of quite ordinary situations—but in addition to that, you've been taken in for further treatment on three occasions, not counting the one when we directed you to Peaslee Pharmaceuticals so that we could give you a more thorough examination than Wilson's people could contrive. We used poor Wingate shamefully, of course, but we had permission from his embassy. We'd have set him straight by now if the silly idiot hadn't taken it into his head to go underground—but we're not displeased about that, because we may be able to use him again. The opposition will undoubtedly be after him too. While you've been in their untender care, they've manipulated your perceptions very carefully indeed, depositing amazingly elaborate confabulations in your memory—amazingly persuasive ones, too, if what you told Wingate on the train is true. They must have been trying to push you further and further each time, to see how far you'd go before you refused to accept the supposed evidence of your own senses.
